Saturday, September 19, 2015

Sailing the Seven Seas

The Climatological Database for the World's Oceans 1750-1850 is extracting meteorological data from historical ship logbooks. These historical records contain a wealth of data both about the routes taken by ships and the weather conditions encountered by the ships during their voyages.

Morgan Herlocker has taken the location data from these 100 years of ship logs and plotted them on a Mapbox map. The thousands of data points in Ships Logs have been processed into vector tilesets using tippecanoe.

One thing that clearly emerges from all this data is the routes of the major shipping lanes from 1750-1850.